Scaffolds: A Childhood Memoir of Books

As a GenXer in the 1980s, I grew up as a latch-key kid. TV, movies, and video games vied for my siblings and my attention as we ate junk food. Yet, I became a reader at an early age, majored in English post-high school, and became a teacher and writer. Something about my childhood encouraged me to become a life-long reader. What was it?

SCAFFOLDS is for non-readers, new readers, and kid readers who grew up and never lost their childlike love for good books and good stories. Kids, like me.

And kids, like you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: A Memoir of Sorts
1: How a Navy Nomad Learned English
2: A Brown Kid on Guam & Three Investigators on the Prairie
3: Movies – the Gateway to Books
4: The Accidental Autodidact, or How to Raise a Nerd
5: When the Reader Wrote
6: The Lewis, the Library & the Dynamic Duo
7: Pa’s Books
8: Portrait of an Anglophile as a Teen Girl
9: The How, Not the What, of Assigned Books
10: Physicists, Philosophers & Fools for God
11: The Takeaway, or These Go to Eleven
Bibliography
Appendix: My Narnia Short Story

About Rufel Ramos

RUFEL F. RAMOS is an English professor at Eastfield College, a community college in Mesquite, Texas, just east of Dallas.
She is also a survivor of a rigorous liberal arts education, a single mother, an aunt, a big sister, the oldest child, an adopted kid, an Asian-American, a US Navy brat, a bemused Catholic, a sci-fi/fantasy geek, a once-and-future globe trotter, and a writer.
She often writes on any and all of those roles on her blog, thelizardqueen.wordpress.com and her website, rowenasworld.org.